Word: deng
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...only were farmworkers liberated at last from the cruel and often capricious authority of the "team leaders" who supervised the communes, they were soon given tangible inducements to work hard, earn more and live well. In 1979 Deng introduced an "agricultural responsibility system," whereby China's 800 million peasants could make contracts with the state to sell a fixed amount of produce at a set price each year. After that level was reached, the workers could then sell any surplus to the state at a markup of 50% or on the open market at whatever price they could...
...trendy "me" generationism from the West are bound to disrupt a culture famous for both its antiquity and its insularity. As it has tried to yank itself into modernity while preserving its respect for history, to sustain simultaneously its dedication to progress and its devotion to the past, Deng's China?like contemporary Japan in its very different way?has often lost its balance...
There are many other signs that Deng's innovative policy has begun to undermine the values of both history and ideology. Peasants are reluctant to join collective projects or to tend such communal needs as village irrigation when they can make more money by tilling their own fields. Self-sufficiency has prompted others to evade the law. To curb population growth, the government has forced women to use birth-control devices, agree to be sterilized or undergo abortions, while also decreeing that those with more than one child must lose 10% of their income for at least five years. Some...
...victims of the political flip-flops: the 20 million Chinese who by virtue of being educated are considered to be "intellectuals." Though the new regime is undoubtedly less merciless than Mao's, it has shown a frightening propensity for relapsing into violent bouts of puritanism and dogmatism. In 1979 Deng released the country from the cultural straitjacket of the Mao era, admitting Shakespeare and Updike, Mickey Mouse and Muhammad Ali, the Beatles and the Boston Symphony. In the following year, however, he endorsed a brutal backlash. By 1981 leftist ideologues were publicly censuring Playwright Bai Hua, who had dared...
...months ago, Deng launched what may be his final attempt to put his own mark, and some irreversible spin, on the history of China. Frankly admitting that it was "currently beset with many serious problems," the Communist Party leadership announced a three-year plan to review the ideological credentials of its 40 million members. The drive is designed in effect to purge the party of around a million unregenerate leftists, the majority of them ill-educated Maoists who have been desperately clinging to power...